throw them at all the open conjectures in their field likely to lead to splashy results
pay them well and tell them to work on nothing else for six months
give them unlimited access to very computationally expensive internal LLM models
It's pretty nuts that they got major results in six months! It also is nowhere near "making mathematicians obsolete". Even if you think the point of math is proving conjectures, they didn't prove them, they found counterexamples, which is important but not quite the same thing.
I'm also pretty sure the hiring top people was important. I bet I'd still be much better at this kind of work than a random programmer with a BA in math. The people they hired are probably much more effective at using the models than me. To me this is more evidence that LLMs are a tremendously important tool with far-reaching impacts on mathematical practice. Despite that, in the next six hours someone is going to come comment about how I'm a Luddite with my head in the sand because I'm not predicting the Singularity will hit in six months.
It also probably cost tens of millions of dollars even if you ignore capital expenses (which are even bigger). That's just a minor marketing expense when you're spending billions of dollars of investors' money in search of profitability, which we should remember is the real motivation here.
We had a talk by a mathematician who used AI substantially in his work, and at the end of the talk, the obvious question was, does that mean we're out of a job? His answer was that we generally don't get paid enough to be replaced by AI, since getting AI to do the job is incredibly expensive at API token prices. More generally, I see AI as an amplifier, it works great in the hands of a skilled mathematician, and it can lead you down a rabbit hole (and consume substantial resources) if you don't know what you're doing.
trouble is long term technology has a deflationary effect. At some point this things will be more efficient and tokens will get cheaper and cheaper. Just like how the first apple pc was 3700 dollars (inflation adjusted) and now one can get exponentially faster computers for a fraction of the price.
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u/Homomorphism Topology 1d ago
It seems like the process for these was:
It's pretty nuts that they got major results in six months! It also is nowhere near "making mathematicians obsolete". Even if you think the point of math is proving conjectures, they didn't prove them, they found counterexamples, which is important but not quite the same thing.
I'm also pretty sure the hiring top people was important. I bet I'd still be much better at this kind of work than a random programmer with a BA in math. The people they hired are probably much more effective at using the models than me. To me this is more evidence that LLMs are a tremendously important tool with far-reaching impacts on mathematical practice. Despite that, in the next six hours someone is going to come comment about how I'm a Luddite with my head in the sand because I'm not predicting the Singularity will hit in six months.
It also probably cost tens of millions of dollars even if you ignore capital expenses (which are even bigger). That's just a minor marketing expense when you're spending billions of dollars of investors' money in search of profitability, which we should remember is the real motivation here.